Are there any JRPGs where regular fights aren't auto-battle fodder? Only the bosses require engaging with mechanics, so when a dungeon has 10 floors you're just sleepwalking through 100+ trash encounters that have no meaning beyond "gives exp and money". It's just a massive waste of time. Why do JRPG fans prefer this kind of design?
>>4128480JRPG fans prefer this kind of trash encounters because they’re vile vermin with no sense of taste.A man with a modicum of self-esteem would suffer moral injury when presented with a “filler” encounter. “What do you mean filler? You are explicitly trying to waste my time while putting in little effort?” he’d grumble.The JRPG fan is beaten, subdued and raped into submission by life, he’s a failed man, he’ll take any kind of abuse and humiliation. This includes filler encounters.
>>4128480I'm not much of a JRPG player but the only JRPG that felt like a fun challenge to me was Trails of Steel
>>4128480etrian odyssey if you're not a pussy
>>4128480>Are there any JRPGs where regular fights aren't auto-battle fodder? Only the bosses require engaging with mechanicsI fail to see how you aren't engaging with mechanics for regular battles. Do you mean you want more curated fights and not random encounters you'll eventually outlevel?
SaGa Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond
>>4128515The phrase “engaging with mechanics” is used as a mating call on /vrpg/ by homosexuals, anon. See also: “immersed in the systems”
>>4128524shut the fuck up saganigger
>>4128480I'm playing 8bit Adventures 2 right now. The random encounters are all kind of gimmicky. Like, I'm in this Not-Japan region with Zombie Samurai. The Steal ability has a handy icon that tell you if the enemy has a rare item you don't have. It's tricky, because you waste a whole battle failing to steal from them. Next battle, whatever, kill them with fire. They get the burn status. The Zombie Samurai then commit seppuku and transform into will-o-wisps. Other will-o-wisp battles don't have anything to steal. But these transformed wisps still have the item you couldn't steal. *Yoink* You now have the Samurai's Spear you couldn't steal before.
>>4128480Trails of Cold Steel onwards on hard or nightmare difficulty.
>>4128480you mean JRPGs that dont have autobattle mechanics or JRPGs that require thinking and not just mashing A until you win?
>>4128480Not a JRPG but I second Etrian Odyssey (3 onward).
>>4128480I'm playing FF VI, the "best FF ever" and I genuinely regret whenever I even start the game on my Steam Deck^TM. I finished Chrono Trigger earlier and I thought that was a boring fucking chore that was inferior to Septerra Core (which ripped off everything from it) except the level design. SC as a superior PC game at least lets you use the console to turn off / skip the trash encounters (or even normal level relevant encounters if you can't handle the later level boredom no more).Admittedly, as a high test Slav Codexchad, I couldn't play most JRPGs as a kid, so I had no nostalgia and maybe even sour grapes when I wanted FF7 but instead got SC as "we have FF7 at home" but I genuinely think that it and the other Western made JRPGs (Anachronox, even tranny shit like Troondertale and Fear & Hunger, incl Troonmina) just shit on almost all the JRPGs I ever played as an adult.It's probably controversial to hear for veteran JRPG troons, but Trails in the Sky 1-3 (the original) and Persona 3-5 were all more fun and engaging for me because at least I could cope with the quartz shit and Persona race mixing giving me delusions of having freedom in between the sloppofights. And to be fair, Sky's fights were pretty fast and post 4 Persona didn't have too many that you couldn't avoid.
>>4128493I have the first game on my backlog/bought it after I finished the Sky games in 2020 or 2021 and I still haven't even installed it. That>Rean, hahaguy with a harem of generic animu sluts is such a turn off.
>>4128480It's somewhat memed, but you really can't relax in this game.
>>4128480Xenosaga 2. Every generic battle is a 5+ minute ordeal that requires making full use of the combat mechanics.
>>4128480Seraphic blue
>>4128480>It's just a massive waste of timeAnd yet you want a JRPG where each combat encounter takes 10 times longer.
>>4128778Yes, make the encounters actually WORTH PLAYING. Because if all I'm doing is mashing A or just watching auto-battle resolve itself, then why am I even here? How is this different from watching paint dry? Why not play a good game instead?
>>4128480Cosmic Star Heroine. No random encounters, each fight feels like a puzzle. Not especially difficult on normal, but you do have to use your brain instead of mashing "attack."Fire Emblem and other SRPGs.I haven't personally played them, but the general consensus from this board and other places has been that some of the Saga games avoid this issue. Your mileage may vary.
Realistically speaking, you shouldn't have any JRPG in your top 10 RPG list if you're a real RPG fan. It doesn't mean that if you fill your top 10 with shit RPGs but no JRPGs you are a real RPG fan, but having even a single JRPG voids your club membership.
FFXIIIChrono Cross but not to the extent that it's hard, you just have to click a lot of buttons rather than a few, more so if you do a magic run
>>4128493trails is the exact thing op is trying to avoid
>>4128493Is this about chem trails from planes turning men into gay and/or "anime girls"?
>>4129124you're thinking of 4chan.org/vrpg/
>>4129124It's about trains and swords
>>4129053Why so?
>>4128480>Are there any JRPGs where regular fights aren't auto-battle fodder?Yeah, there's a few these days. Like Rise of the 3rd Power and Quartet, but the grass isn't greener. The human brain can't help but make comparisons, it's how narrative foils work, and part of what makes bosses feel so intimidating and memorable is because they stand in stark contrast to the rabble of monsters that are 1 or 2 taps in the dungeon. So while the dungeon monsters take a bit more thought to beat in these newer games, they make the bosses feel like a speed bump as opposed to a mountain and so the bosses aren't nearly as memorable.I think the secret sauce is simple enemies that are easy to understand and even easier to beat on their own, but when combined with other simple enemies that are also easy to understand and even easier to beat on their own, together make a more interesting puzzle to get around. Like think of Thunder and Volts in BoF3. They're not that difficult to beat. But when you get ambushed, that Thunder casts Jolt on itself and all those Volts, all of a sudden the encounter turns deadly. That's not a fodder encounter anymore.continued...
>>4128480cont. from >>4129630>Why do JRPG fans prefer this kind of design?It's all part of the male warrior myth genre. We typically want to see a man that is stronger than ourselves and the average person. So when AVALANCHE comes hurtling into the Reactor Station and has a quick skirmish with the Shinra guards? This acts as a foil. We can see AVALANCHE is stronger than these fighter type guys. When Barret signals to Cloud and Cloud does a super hero flip off the top of the train, immediately gets into a fight with 2 Shinra guards and wins by himself? That acts as another foil that Cloud is stronger than the individual members of AVALANCHE.Part of how we continue to impress upon the strength of Cloud is how easily he's able to defeat what would otherwise be deadly encounters to a normal human, and this catches our attention. What also catches our attention is if super villains and super monsters come in to legitimately challenge our superhero. From big monster bosses to Tseng kidnapping Aeris. I could go on, but this male warrior myth genre has probably the broadest and widest appeal across the entire world and part of what makes a "warrior male" work is that they can fight well enough to beat deadly threats that would kill us, and grow to fight well enough to beat threats that are so impossibly deadly that they're civilization or world ending, and one of the primary vehicles to make it work is through the use of foils.At least that's my opinion on it.
>>4128480crystal project (yes it's a JRPG, shut up) was intended to be like this but I don't entirely think it succeeded
>>4129584Trains is a hard job
>>4129631>When Barret signals to Cloud and Cloud does a super hero flip off the top of the trainPosts you can hear
>>4128480Etrian Odyssey is right there dude
>>4128480Plenty>NISThe item world is hell and can though some curveballs at you. Also until you get the game's grind spot normal battles require quite a bit of strategy >Kingdom HeartsEnemies scale>FFTEnemies scale>>>4129111like he said, there are some challenging bosses all throughout the FFXIII trilogy and level grinding isn't going to make things either >there are caps until you progress to subsequent areas in the first>the second has limits as well.>the third has dresspheres that have cooldowns there a really nasty boss in the third one in which you are going to have to bide your time.>Chrono CrossSame level progression limiters as well as really nasty enemies in certain areas.
>>4129633too much time wasted on the stupid bullshit platforming/exploration which isn't satisfying for me to bother with
>>4128480>have no meaning beyond "gives exp and money"If that is what you think, then there's less meaning behind regular enemies in games like Bioshock where there's no exp and you're only wasting your resources and your own time to fight them when you can conserve your limited resource by running away, so is Bioshock designed to be a coward simulator? You tell me...Look, all I know is, I'm relaxing I.R.L. and gaining something while easily beating regular mobs in JRPGs, and then I go to the nearby towns to prepare for the next destination because that's kinda immersive, I guess.If you've played enough JRPGs, you'd know that every now and then there are physical-resistant enemies that are weak to magic too. It's not going to be a cakewalk all the way through to the end.
>>4128480listen dude just play what you want and shut up
>>4128480Isn't that the main gimmick of saga series? Or at least a few of their games
>>4128480When every encounter is a fight for survival you end up with Wizardry 8 which only the most autistic men on the planet can stomach long enough to even reach the first village
>>4128682You absolutely can, it just has a steep beginning. Once you start getting even remotely strong you just steamroll anything that isn't a boss, and even bosses aren't that hard. The reason it's "memed" is because it was a lot of people's first SMT, 4 is objectively much harder
You say this like non-boss encounters in CRPGs aren't also mostly easy fodder for xp. They're called trash fights for a reason.
>>4134825All encounters in BG3 are unique, every goblin you kill has a custom name.
>>4135194>every goblin you kill has a custom nameWow, a BG3 fanboy just lying on the internet? You’d go out and just do that?>Goblin enemy variants:>Goblin Brawler>Goblin Booyahg>Goblin Boss>Goblin Devout>Goblin Sapper>Goblin Sharp-Eye>Goblin Tracker>Goblin Warlock>Goblin Warrior
>>4134824>4 is objectively much harderNo? 3 had several puzzle fights and points where you needed to change your whole party to progress4 had too many conveniences to be hard
>>4128480The problem is it eventually devolves into tedium. Take Agarest Senki. The battle system heavily relies on positioning to enable combo attacks, but it simultaneously means there are filler encounters that are weak enough that you shouldn't really be threatened but simultaneously where you can't just fully relax and still need to go through the steps of slowly moving everyone into specific patterns to get shit done efficiently.The problem is modern RPGs try to present the classic dungeon vibe while having forgotten that some encounters shouldn't be hard, but should be a test of resource management until reaching the end.
>>4134824Its difficulty is hyped because popular JRPGs are so easy you can beat the games without understanding any part of the combat systems with some grinding. In a perfect world Nocturne would be completely average in challenge
